Tuesday, March 15, 2011

The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga By Paul Brunton

Dr. Paul Brunton elaborately and painstakingly lays out a path to understanding Ultimate Reality for all who hunger for something far more substantial and permanent in their life. Step-by-step the author proceeds through the various levels of truth-seeker. By quality and veracity of understanding, the first and lowest order is the religious believer who blindly follows the works (and follies) of another. The second and middling level if the mystic, who having secured his own wordless understanding, has failed to go beyond his own fleeting visions and proceed onto the timeless, intellectual understanding of the Absolute Truth which holds true regardless of time and space. The first 300 or so pages discuss the various reasons and aptitudes of those who belong to the lower two paths, and why it is so important to go beyond. Only after reaching the midpoint does the author begin to point the reader towards the source of this magnificent reality. In fact, he does not explicitly state the hidden teaching until the sequel. But it is obvious through reading this book that the source of Reality is the Mind.

This book is chock full of great quotes and timeless aphorisms. He urges Mankind to shrug off the materialist outlook on Reality, and to "Mentalize space and to spatialize the mind."